THE taxi driver I got at Perth airport earlier this week was middle-aged, somewhat refined, like a teacher fallen on hard times. He was also a bit sour with the world as he perceived it through the cosmos of his cab. He didn't like Ben Cousins and stated a view echoed by others during my time in Perth — Cousins had connections with criminal elements attached to the drug trade.

The taxi driver said drugs are a lot more in your face in Perth than Melbourne or Sydney. How he knew this I wasn't sure, but one thing I do know — when viewing events in the west of Australia from the east we tend to overlook the fact that Perth right now is running at the sort of social temperature Melbourne hasn't known for a century. The boom is on. In Perth, the time is now. As people over there say — there's a lot of money around.

Is Ben Cousins more than a football story? The taxi driver thought so. "He was on the front page of the West Australian five days in a row!" he exploded. I have a contact in Perth who is extremely knowing of the place in a political, social and sporting sense. He made a case to me that Ben Cousins was the reason the Labor Party didn't get the swing in Western Australia that it got in the rest of Australia at the recent federal election. "People over here just didn't have time to think about the election," he said.

In the middle of the escalating Cousins drama, and again involving Cousins, came the death of Chris Mainwaring. If you want to stop a person from Perth in their tracks ask them not about Cousins, but about Mainwaring. The great Eagles team of the early '90s in which Mainwaring played has come to represent a sort of football innocence in Western Australia, a memory of a time when the game was as simple as running with a ball and kicking it.

In Perth, I asked some big West Coast supporters I've known for years how Cousins is viewed by the club's fans. Some have pity for him, I was told. Some are angry. When my friends went to Tasmania during the year, they were surprised by the hostility the mention of West Coast aroused. The suggestion seemed to be they'd be better people if they abandoned the club over Cousins. But they still see Cousins as being, in part, one of theirs.

What I was told about the attitude of young people to drugs in Perth (and possibly also here in Melbourne) is that popping an ecstasy pill is a lot cheaper than getting drunk. It's seen as a consumer issue.

In Perth, I met a young sportswoman who said all her friends take pills. "I hate it," she says. The young woman was also a big West Coast supporter. To her, Cousins' return match at Subiaco was as big as a grand final. "Everyone thought he was back on track," she said. But he wasn't. Ben was off the track, where he'd been for a quite a time, handling his habit to the extent that he kept playing.

You don't get much bigger than Ben Cousins in Perth. He is the Perth champion of the Australian game. West Coast is a proud club. For some years, he carried that pride alone, then won a premiership when Chris Judd and Daniel Kerr joined him to make a midfield of unstoppable brilliance. Great midfields win the modern game and West Coast had the best since Brisbane Lions' Fab Four. Then it all fell apart and there was Ben Cousins like a figure in a myth at the centre of the wreckage.

The Ben Cousins story is huge — for Cousins, for West Coast, for the game. It's actually bigger than the game since, measured on the number of times his name was mentioned, it was the biggest story for 2007 in Australian sport. And it's far from over yet.

If the overall picture is what you're interested in, you might like to include the views of two of Cousins' former teammates, David Wirrpanda and Ashley Hansen. Wirrpanda is no fool in his judgement of people and politics. I was surprised by the strength of his feeling for Cousins. He described him as a great football leader with a great aura. (I should add Wirrpanda's view of football is not romantic — he's too professional for that). He also said Cousins had mental toughness. I questioned that, given that he had an addiction. "He also has a weakness," said Wirrpanda, "but that can happen to the best of us. My door will always be open to Ben Cousins".

Hansen won the Chris Mainwaring Award for West Coast's best clubman 10 days after Mainwaring died. Hansen has an old-fashioned love of his footy club and a new-fashioned football brain, being a few subjects off a physical science degree. A Victorian who was initially lonely in Perth, he was won over to the Eagles as a club when the big crowd met them at the airport after they lost the 2005 grand final. He agrees with Wirrpanda. Hansen saw a bump leave Cousins on the ground in spasms. He was back on the field before the end of the same quarter and kicked the goal that lifted them. And then there were all those times he ran hard in the last quarter and West Coast won.

The closeness of footballers at AFL clubs is much exaggerated. At one very real level, they are actually competitors. They are more like classmates at a rather serious high school. Hansen knew Cousins around the club but not outside it. Was he a great leader? "Oh, yes," he said. "Even after Juddy was captain, it was Cuzzy who did the talking. He was the one who got us together before the game and made us excited about playing. That's what I'll miss about him."